I am a foreign correspondent, working mainly for The Times of London covering southern Africa. Before that, I worked for them as a staff news reporter in London, and before that, I was their Mexico correspondent covering the drug war, among other stories. Since arriving in South Africa in 2013, I have covered the big stories – including ebola, the rise of Boko Haram, Nelson Mandela's death and Oscar Pistorius's murder trial – for the paper, as well as radio stations and TV news shows around the world. But it's the ones that make fewer waves, or the back-stories, that I have really enjoyed reporting, though they are often very sad – the plight of the slum-dwellers in Durban, the foreign victims of xenophobic violence in South Africa, and Rwandan opposition leaders being quietly assassinated in exile, for example. I grew up in East Africa, by Lake Victoria and the Serengeti, but I didn't live in a mud hut and I didn't have a pet lion. I studied in the UK – history and philosophy at the University of York and later an MA in broadcast journalism at City University, London. I am learning to box, and I love to scuba dive.
